Clear your weekend schedule, Gears of War 4 players: Microsoft this weekend is letting Xbox users battle it out with those on PCs.

In a Wednesday blog post, Gears of War Community Manager TC Octus said "the purpose of this weekend is to give crossplay a trial run in a public playlist." Cross-platform play will be open from Friday, Dec. 2 through Monday, Dec. 5.

"This test is being conducted to evaluate the potential of a more permanent crossplay solution in the future to allow Windows 10 and Xbox One gamers to play together in Versus outside of Private Matches," Octus wrote.

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Octus isn't making any promises about what will happen after the test, but he called this weekend an "incredibly important" first step in the process to trail crossplay. They'll use data gathered from the weekend and player feedback, to make a decision about crossplay moving forward.

"We care deeply about players on both platforms and we've heard you, so our goal is to use this event to bring in a ton of data and listen to feedback from players on both platforms to examine the results," Octus wrote. "The key thing we want to stress is that we won't be making any surprise changes all of a sudden based on this weekend."

The team urged players to participate this weekend, and share their concerns or hopes for crossplay. As an incentive, experience points are going up this weekend (from 600 to 1500 for wins, and from 100 to 750 for losses), and you'll be allowed to play with squads of up to five people.

Angela has been a PCMag reporter since January 2012. Prior to joining the team, she worked as a reporter for SC Magazine, covering everything related to hackers and computer security. Angela has also written for The Northern Valley Suburbanite in New Jersey, The Dominion Post in West Virginia, and the Uniontown-Herald Standard in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of West Virginia University's Perely Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
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